Flying Through Midnight

A Pilot's Dramatic Story of His Secret Missions Over Laos During the Vietnam War

In 1970, a young American pilot arrived at a dusty, half-deserted U.S. air force base and found himself on a battlefront he'd never heard of: the secret black-ops war in Laos. John T. Halliday was instructed to fly a retrofitted C-123 transport to direct night-time air strikes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The mission sent Halliday, his plane, and his fellow men into the teeth of enemy fire--and required breaking every rule he had ever learned about flying. In this compelling account, Halliday takes us inside a top-secret air base and into the cockpit of an antiquated plane that was a lifeline for special forces on the ground. As he chronicles his evolution from a by-the-book flyboy to a daring warrior of the night, he also tells the story of a truly heroic, seemingly impossible flight: of how he and his men survived a horrific engagement with the enemy, attempted a harrowing a crash landing, and what they found deep inside a forbidden land "